Gathering Data Over the Web

Inquisit 5 enables you send data from the desktop machine running the experiment
to a remote server on the network. The ability to save data to a remote server is
critical for experiments conducted over the web because the experimenter often does
not have access to the participant's computer to retrieve any locally saved data
files. The feature can also be used with Inquisit Lab, for example,
in cases where it is more convenient to save the data to a single location rather
than having to copy the data files from multiple computers in a classroom or lab.

There are several options for saving data to a remote server.

Save the data to the millisecond.com web server where the experimenter can login
and download the files.

Send the data to a web server via HTTP POST

Send the data to an FTP server

Save the data to a shared network (UNC) folder

Of couse, it is also possible for both web and lab experiments to save the data
to the local machine in cases where the experiment is run on lab or classroom
computers.

Option 1 (saving the data to millisecond.com) is the default behavior of Inquisit
Web, and it is by far the most reliable and easiest solution. To protect
against snoopers and sniffers, data is encrypted and posted back to millisecond.com
using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the same technology used by online shopping and
banking web sites to protect sensitive information transmitted over the web. Each
participant's data is saved to the server is a separate file. The experimenter can
login and download the files from the
millisecond.com web site. Again, the downloaded files are encrypted over
the network using SSL.

While option 1 is appropriate for the vast majority of experimenters, in some cases
it may be necessary or desirable to leverage some of the other remote data features
of Inquisit. The means by which data is saved to a server is controlled by the following
attributes on the data element.

Encrypt specifies whether Inquisit should first encrypt the data before
being sending it back to the server. If the data is being saved over SSL, this command
can be set to "false" since the data will be encrypted using standard web protocols.
If SSL is not an option, this command should be set to "true" to obfuscate
potentially sensitive data from being compromised by hackers and packet sniffers
as it travels over the network. Encrypted data files are saved with the "inq" extension.
Unencrypted data files have the "dat" extenstion.

The file attribute specifies the location to which the data is saved. This
can be any of the following:

Http or https address (e.g., https://www.millisecond.com/
). Inquisit uses the HTTP POST protocol to send the data back to the web server.
Most web development technologies (PHP, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP) have easy to use methods
for extracting data that has been posted to the server.

Ftp address
(e.g., ftp://www.millisecond.com/mydata/). Inquisit uses the standard FTP protocol
to save files to a folder on an ftp server.

Unc path
(e.g., \\millisecond\mydata\). If you are running the experiment inside a LAN, you
can save the data to a writeable network share.

Local path (e.g., c:\inquisit\mydata\). Inquisit saves the data to the
specified path on the client computer.

If you specify a folder with no file name, Inquisit will default the file name to
that of the script file. Otherwise, it will use the specified file name. So as not
to overwrite other data files on the server, Inquisit also appends the date and
time (to the nearest millisecond) to the file name along with the "dat" or "inq"
file extension depending whether encryption is turned on.

The userid and password attributes allows you to specify login
credentials to use when accessing the web, ftp, or unc. It is not necessary
to specify the userid or password when saving the data to millisecond.com.

When saving data to a remote server, Inquisit creates separate data files for each
run of the script as opposed to appending the data to a single file as it does in
the case of saving to a local folder. This is to avoid potential collisions that
might occur when multiple clients attempt to save to the server at the same time.
You can combine multiple data files into a single file by selecting the "Open" command
on Inquisit's file menu and multi-selecting all of the files you wish to combine.
Inquisit will open all of the selected files, appending them together. You can then
select the "Save As" command on Inquisit's File menu to save the combined data into
a single file.

Note that data collection capabilities of both Inquisit Web and Inquisit
Lab are disabled unless a license has been purchased.